Family Business
by Dani-Ellie03
Summary: Companion piece to "The Best Day." "All right, fine," Emma sighed, "but let's make one thing clear. Today we are not father and daughter. Today we are sheriff and deputy. I'm the boss, and what I say goes."


**Title:** Family Business  
**Summary: **"All right, fine," Emma sighed, "but let's make one thing clear. Today we are not father and daughter. Today we are sheriff and deputy. I'm the boss, and what I say goes."  
**Spoilers: **Let's say everything up to 2x11, "The Outsider."  
**Rating/Warning:** K+, for brief language. Family fluff.  
**Characters:** Charming and Emma, with guest appearances by Snow and Henry.  
**Disclaimer:** _Once Upon a Time_ and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I stole the characters when they weren't looking, but I'll give them back soon, I promise.  
**Author's Note: **Here's the Charming/Emma companion piece to "The Best Day" because I am desperate for some daddy/daughter time. It takes place during the same day, but you don't have to have read that one to understand this one. Feedback is a happy! Enjoy. :)

* * *

"I'm telling you," Emma Swan muttered as she plopped down at the breakfast table with her father and son, "in one of the early drafts of Dante's _Inferno_, he depicted the inhabitants of the ninth circle of Hell doing nothing but paperwork for all eternity."

Henry tried to swallow a laugh at his mother's declaration and ended up swallowing his cereal wrong instead. He coughed and spluttered, causing Emma to jerk to sudden, concerned attention. "Arms up, Henry!" Snow called from the stove.

Without taking even a second to question it, Henry raised both hands above his head. Only after he stopped coughing and caught his breath did he bring them back down to the table. Now that her son was okay, Emma allowed her utter confusion to show, arching an eyebrow at her mother. "Since when does putting your arms up have any medical benefit against choking?"

"It's a grandmother thing," Snow told her as she scooped scrambled eggs out of the pan for her and Emma. "Getting back to your original point, though, I think Dante predates the concept of paperwork by a couple of centuries."

"Well, in my version, the ninth circle of Hell would consist of doing nothing but paperwork for all eternity," Emma grumbled.

"Let me guess," Henry teased, his voice still a little raspy from his coughing fit. "You hate paperwork."

Oh, hatred was far too tame an emotion for what Emma felt for paperwork. Paperwork was … evil. Like, created-by-Regina evil. It was mindless and boring and tedious and – like all mindless, boring, tedious things – utterly necessary. After all, she worked for a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies certainly loved them some paperwork.

It was the one part of Emma's job that she literally could not stand. Since she hated it, she preferred get it done as it came along instead of amassing a mountain of the stuff. Her father, it seemed, didn't quite share her preferences.

She was of course grateful that David had stepped in and taken over the day-to-day sheriff duties for her during her time trapped in the Enchanted Forest. She just wished he had done her paperwork, too. She didn't know whether he didn't know he had to do it or whether he, like her, loathed it beyond all reason. Truthfully, she didn't care. The end result was that she now had to give up an entire Saturday to do everything he had neglected to do. Filling out forms, writing reports, filing … everything that had accumulated over those few weeks while she was gone.

Oh, and had she mentioned that she'd set her alarm for seven? On a _Saturday_. Seven o'clock was a time that no human being should ever have to see on a Saturday morning.

So, needless to say, she was a more than little cranky this morning. "Yeah, kid," she said, answering Henry's point, "I hate paperwork."

Snow handed Emma a mug of coffee and plate of toast and eggs before turning back to the counter to finish putting together her own breakfast. Emma sipped the dark liquid and smiled despite her grumpiness. She had no idea how to Snow managed to make her coffee perfectly the first time every single morning: a splash of cream and a pinch of sugar. Emma herself had to adjust her initial pour most of the time.

Snow finally sat down at the table with her plate, her eyes darting between her guilty husband and her grouchy daughter. "You know, Emma," Snow said in a nonchalant tone, "you should take Charming with you when you go to the station."

Emma almost spit out her coffee, and David actually dropped his slice of toast. Henry clamped a hand over his mouth to muffle his giggle at his family's dramatics. "It's just a suggestion," Snow added as she picked up her fork and dug into her eggs.

For a brief moment, the only thing Emma could do was stare at her mother. Just a suggestion? It would have been a fine suggestion on any other day but not today. She was irritable as it was; all she wanted to do was get the paperwork done and get back home. Taking someone with her would only slow her down.

"It is my fault you're behind, Emma," David said after recovering from his moment of shock. "It's only fair that I help you out."

She was about to tell him that it wasn't necessary – because honestly, she worked better alone – but the look on his face stopped her. There was hope in his eyes and a tiny optimistic smile on his lips. She glanced at her mother, who was pretending not to watch the two of them while wearing a little smile of her own. Aw, crap. This really wasn't about the paperwork at all, was it?

Damn it, how could she say no to this? "All right, fine," she sighed, "but let's make one thing clear. Today we are not father and daughter. Today we are sheriff and deputy. I'm the boss, and what I say goes."

"Yes, ma'am," David teased, straightening in the chair so that he was sitting at attention. He executed a mini-salute in his daughter's direction. "Anything you say, ma'am."

Emma heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes before ducking her head to hide her amusement.

* * *

Father and daughter bickered the whole way out of the apartment and down the stairs. Emma wasn't proud of her snippiness, but the fact that this entire outing was David's fault couldn't be ignored. She had even thrown the "seven o'clock on a Saturday morning" thing in his face a couple of times because … well, she'd had to get up at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning. What more needed to be said?

The drive to the station, however, was surprisingly peaceful. The chilly air on the walk to the car woke Emma up a bit and the drive gave the coffee time to work its magic. By the time she unlocked the door to the station, she felt much better. Calmer, anyway, and ready to face the paperwork mountain in her office. She still detested giving up a Saturday to do paperwork, of course, but maybe having her father helping her wouldn't be as bad as she'd originally thought.

Since the day would be filled with drudgery, Emma supposed they had to take their fun where they could get it. She marched directly to her office, grabbed the stack of files that were awaiting reports and forms, and thumped them down on one of the desks in the bullpen.

Panic flashed into David's eyes at the sheer height of the pile. "Don't worry," Emma smiled in an effort to set him at ease, "I'm not making you do all of this."

He let out a breath of relief. "Thank you."

"I take it you hate paperwork as much as I do."

"I don't think it's possible for anyone to hate paperwork as much you do," he teased, causing Emma to shoot him a sheepish grin, "but no, it's not my favorite thing in the world. So, what, are we splitting that stack up evenly?"

"Nope. We're going to play Rock Paper Scissors for it. Eleven rounds for eleven files, loser takes the top file in the stack."

David raised his eyebrows at her, an amused smile on his lips. "Rock Paper Scissors?"

"It's more fun than flipping a coin and just as fair. I mean, neither one of us can read minds." At least, Emma didn't think she could read minds. Not without trying, anyway, and the thought of trying kind of scared the crap out of her.

All of a sudden, she thought of something she probably should have thought of earlier. "Um, did you guys have Rock Paper Scissors in the Enchanted Forest?"

"No," he chuckled, "but David Nolan knows how to play."

Statements like that, said as if they made perfect sense and were not weird as hell, made Emma's brain hurt. She shook her head to rid herself of the weirdness – as if that was possible – and held out her hands in preparation for the game. "All right. First folder's up for grabs. On three …."

She counted to three and threw Rock. So did David. Well, at least that was proof she couldn't read minds. "You do know that we're supposed to throw different things, right?" Emma asked him.

"Yes, I am aware," he replied dryly. "One ... two ... three."

Figuring that David would change it up, Emma threw Rock again. True to her suspicions, David threw Scissors. Emma gently knocked his Scissors out of the way with her Rock. Then, with a triumphant grin, she dropped the top file in the stack onto David's desk, creating a new pile for him. "Let's hope they all go like this," she teased.

By the time they reached the end of the stack, David had seven folders to Emma's four. At first she was psyched that she'd gotten off so easily but a surprising pang of guilt went through her when David hefted his stack into his hands. The guilt must have registered on her face because he smiled gently at her. "None of that now. I won these – or lost them, I suppose – fair and square."

She gave him a little smile of her own in gratitude and picked up her comparatively much smaller stack. David made himself comfortable at the desk and Emma started to head back towards her office. She took all of two steps before pausing and looking over her shoulder at her father. After a brief bit of waffling, she took her stack to the desk next to David's instead.

He raised his eyebrows at her. "I thought you were the boss today."

"Is there a law that says the sheriff can't sit out in the bullpen with her deputy?"

"If there was, I think you'd know about it," he shrugged. His real question went unasked, and Emma kind of hoped he would keep it that way.

Thankfully, he did, and the two of them got down to work. After a while, the silence began to bother Emma. She usually put quiet music on when she was doing paperwork to help pass the time, but she didn't know if the music would bother David. _See?_ she thought with a quiet sigh. This was why she worked better alone.

It took her a moment to realize that this impatience with the silence wouldn't have been soothed with music anyway. She wasn't antsy because she was bored; she was antsy because she was sitting here with her father – alone – for the first time.

So much was tumbling through her mind. So many questions, so many things she wanted to say. The only problem was that she didn't exactly know how to bring any of it up. She took a deep breath, figuring she might as well start with something easy. "You know, I don't think I ever thanked you properly for looking after Henry while I was … unavoidably detained. So thank you."

He tore his eyes from his file, the surprise evident. A second later, he regained emotional control, and the surprise was replaced with a gentle smile. "It was my pleasure. Although, I did learn the hard way that I have to watch him actually get on the bus."

Emma snickered. Yeah, that sounded like Henry. "He's a sneaky one. Just walking him to the bus stop isn't enough and even then, there's no guarantee he'll actually walk into the building once the bus gets to school."

He grinned at her but there was something behind his smile that made Emma feel like he wanted to say so much more. The indescribable something vanished a moment later, and Emma turned the chair to go back to work. She hadn't even completely written one word yet when David said, "Speaking of your time being unavoidably detained … how was it? Snow's been kind of vague."

"How was the Enchanted Forest?" she asked. When he nodded, she gave a halfhearted shrug. "To be honest, it was really flippin' weird. There are all kinds of things I apparently take for granted, like electricity and hot water and prepackaged food and, you know, beds. Oh, and not getting chased by ogres. Playing with swords was kind of fun, though. Once I got over the fighting-for-my-life aspect of it."

Again, David smiled at her. "If you ever want to learn some techniques, I can teach you."

"What, like a swordfighting class?" Emma asked. "You teaching Henry and me with wooden swords?"

"Why not?" David shrugged. "Some training under your belt will teach you to have more control over the weapon so you don't get that initial panic."

She opened her mouth to decline the offer – because she had a gun here – but an acceptance issued forth from her unbidden. She blinked in shock when she heard herself say, "Sure."

David blinked, too. After a moment, a thrilled smile spread across his face. "Well, all right then. I'll see what I can wrangle up for practice weapons."

Suddenly uncomfortable, Emma gave a curt nod and turned back to her paperwork. _What the hell was that?_ she grumbled silently. Why had she agreed to let her father teach her swordfighting techniques?

It took a moment for her to realize that it wasn't Emma the adult who had accepted his offer but Emma the little girl. The little girl who still resided within her and wanted nothing more than a mommy and a daddy to love her and to teach her things.

It was more than a little disconcerting.

Since the conversation had taken a turn Emma clearly wasn't comfortable with, David turned back to his paperwork as well. They worked in silence for a few minutes but Emma couldn't concentrate. Heaving a sigh, she set her pen down and turned her desk chair to face her father. "David, can I ask you something?"

"Of course," he answered, his focus mainly on his file.

"Henry told me that you kept telling him that you'd find us and that we were coming back … when Mary Margaret and I were in the Enchanted Forest, I mean." The fact that she was not only talking to him about something serious but also not using substitute phrases to talk around the situation was not lost on either of them. David paused with his pen poised above his work, surprised eyes focusing on his daughter. Emma took a heavy breath and her question came out in a rush. "Did you really believe that or were you just telling him that to calm him?"

David swiveled his desk chair to face hers, the shock that she'd opened the lines of communication beyond superficial small talk apparent. He only allowed the wonder for a brief moment, though, because he didn't want this door to close. "It was a little bit of both," he admitted. "I did have faith that we would find our way back to each other but the nights were the hardest. Lying there in the dark with two of the people I love most so far away … I couldn't help but wonder if I was ever going to see her again."

He paused, glancing at Emma and debating whether or not to say what he clearly wanted to say. With a fidget and a barely perceptible straightening of his shoulders, he quietly added, "And I wondered if I was going to lose you without ever really getting to know you."

Emma swallowed hard. It struck her not for the first time how unfair it all was. She'd had all that time with her mother when she was Mary Margaret and then she'd had all that time with her in the Enchanted Forest. She'd had barely any time at all with David, and what little she'd had with David Nolan was tainted by … well, David Nolan. Sometimes at night in the Forest, Emma would wonder, too. Wonder if she would ever get back to Henry and wonder if she would ever get the chance to know her father.

"She told me about the beanstalk, you know," he continued, his voice soft. "About what you did for her."

Emma winced at the memory of telling Mulan to cut down the beanstalk. "You mean the thing she yelled at me for?" she asked, mostly to head off another parental scolding. "I felt like a little kid who'd wandered away in a grocery store."

The little smile on David's lips set her at ease. "If I had been there, I probably would have yelled at you, too. But since I wasn't there and I get to look at the situation a little more objectively … thank you. For making sure someone would take care of her if you couldn't. Families do that, too, Emma. They prepare for the worst and hope they never have to put those plans into action."

Again, Emma had to swallow hard. "You're welcome."

"And, you know, don't ever do anything like that again because family always sticks together and yada yada yada," he added with a teasing wink.

Emma chuckled, grateful for the easing of the emotional tension in the air. "Well, as long as we all stay in the same goddamned world, it shouldn't be an issue."

* * *

After a lunch of Granny's takeout – grilled cheese, because Emma had responded, "Is the sky blue?" when David asked if grilled cheese was all right – father and daughter put on their deputy and sheriff hats once more and buckled down on their work. A glance at the clock proved Emma's first instincts correct. Taking someone with her had slowed her down but she was finding to her surprise that she didn't mind the company.

Emma tried to power through what remained of her files before the tedium had a chance to set in but she didn't quite make it. A quarter of the way through the last file, her eyes began to cross. She tossed her pen down in disgust and covered her face with her hands. This was _awful_. If she was going to see this project through to the end, she needed more coffee.

"Are you all right over there?" came David's amused voice from the desk beside her.

"I can't do this anymore," she whined into her hands. Yes, whined. Emma Swan was reducing to whining, and she didn't really care. _That_ was what paperwork did to her. "I just need to make some more coffee–"

"I know I'm just the deputy today so feel free to tell me if I'm speaking out of turn, but you look like you need more than coffee, Emma. How about we take a break?"

She looked over at him sharply, brows raised. He was offering to take a break with her? She gave a nod of assent, though, because a break was something she sorely needed.

While David stood up from the desk and stretched muscles that had gotten tight from the hours of sitting, Emma went to brew some more coffee. Though it wouldn't do wonders for her attention span, a jolt of caffeine would keep her energized enough to finish out the file.

"You know what you need?" David asked as she tapped her foot while impatiently waiting for the coffee to brew.

"Hmm?"

"You need a distraction." He walked over to the printer to grab a blank sheet of copy paper and brought it over to Emma. After snatching a pen from the desk closest to them, he drew out a grid for tic tac toe. "You want Xs or Os?"

"Seriously? Tic tac toe?"

"It's a distraction," he shrugged.

Emma gave a slight roll of her eyes as she plucked the pen from his hand and drew an X in the center of the grid. Grinning, David placed an O diagonally beneath her X.

The game ended in a draw, as did most games of tic tac toe with participants who paid attention and were over the age of eight. "You know, if we're going to play cheesy pen-and-paper games, we have to do this," Emma said, scribbling across the tic tac toe game and turning the paper around. She drew six rows of six dots each and then drew a line between two of the dots. "Do you know this one?"

"You make boxes, right?"

"Yep," she grinned, handing over the pen.

It took a little while for the game to get going but eventually Emma found herself with five boxes before David even had one. "Come on," she teased, trying and failing not to gloat. "You mean to tell me that Prince Charming can't even make one little box?"

David simply gave her a calm smile as he took the pen from her hand. A couple of turns later, he managed to make a chain of ten boxes. Emma's jaw dropped open in surprise. "I believe this is called a reversal of fortune," he teased as he handed the pen back to her.

Well then, Emma would just have to up her game and reverse his reversal. Unfortunately, the only move she could see would give him another chain of boxes. Dropping her head with an inward groan, she drew the line and handed the pen over to him. "Just finish it off."

He couldn't quite finish the game, so the final two boxes went to Emma. "I am so never playing this game with you again," she muttered as she initialed her boxes. She counted the number of Es on the paper: nine, which meant David had sixteen. "You totally wiped the floor with me."

David grinned at her. "Hey, I had to do something to get back at you for wiping the floor with me at Rock Paper Scissors."

Emma smiled back, allowing his admittedly decent point. The air in the station now smelled of freshly brewed coffee, making Emma's smile grow wider. The magical elixir that would help her push through the rest of her mind-numbing paperwork was done. "Thanks for the distraction," she said, pushing herself up from her perch on the desk.

"Don't mention it. You think you're ready to finish off that last file now?"

"Yep. The break cleared my head and the sweet caffeine will power me through." She winked, causing David to laugh before heading back to his desk.

Emma poured herself a mug of coffee. True to form, she had to adjust her cream and sugar levels. Once again, she would never understand how Snow could get it right on the first try each and every time. After perfecting the taste of her coffee, Emma carried the mug back to her desk, took a large sip, and picked up her pen, oblivious to the amused glance David threw her way.

The combination of the break and the caffeine worked wonders. Emma finished the file in record time, closed it with a flourish, and leaned back in her chair with a relieved sigh.

"You done?" David asked her.

"Yes, thank God. How about you?"

"Two more left." He thumped his fifth file down onto his Completed pile.

Emma watched him open the next one with a wince. That guilt – the one he'd told her not to feel right after they finished playing Rock Paper Scissors – was rearing its ugly head again. After a couple of minutes of watching him fill out forms and type up reports, Emma got to her feet and snatched the last file from his desk.

He shot her a puzzled look. "I can't just sit here and watch you work," she shrugged.

"But I thought you were the boss today," he teased. "That's what bosses do. They sit there and watch their underlings work."

"I can give the damn thing back to you if you want."

Smiling, David raised his hand in mock surrender. Emma smiled back and the two of them got down to business. After a few minutes of silence, David said, "Emma?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for letting me come with you today."

"Don't mention it, although I'm sure you had better things to do with your Saturday than spending it doing paperwork."

"I didn't just spend it doing paperwork," he reminded her. She looked up from her file, eyes wary. "I spent it with my daughter, and I had a really nice time."

For a long beat, Emma couldn't speak. She sent him a little smile and after recovering her voice, she said, "I had a really nice time, too."

"Paperwork and all?" he asked teasingly.

"Paperwork and all," she admitted with a smile.


End file.
